


Redacted

by Nilhenwen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Total Recall (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Badass Obi-Wan, Clone Wars, Dubious Consent, Established Relationship, Hurt, Hurt Obi-Wan Kenobi, Imperial Era, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:22:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24919789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nilhenwen/pseuds/Nilhenwen
Summary: If the workday is bad, the walk home is even worse. Tonight, the Coruscanti-populace seems to be particularly boisterous. Ben slips into the middle of the street to avoid the queues for innumerable clubs and pulls his dark jacket closer to hide his oil-stained shirt. His legs ache from crouching in the blasted ion tank all day.He glances left, side-stepping an inebriated Togruta and sees her. Dark hair and a slight frame, slipping between the crowds.The woman. The one he sees every night when he closes his eyes. Soothing, searching, scorching through him.[OR]Ben's nightmares are starting to affect his work - though he's never been much of a mechanic anyway. What if he's meant to be somewhere else - doing something greater? But then he wouldn't have Anakin. When Ben catches sight of something in the street, it seems like his dreams have come alive to haunt him, until an incident in front of the old Temple teaches him that he has no idea who he really is.This is an AU inspired by the Total Recall remake (2012) in which memory schenanigans ensue.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader
Comments: 102
Kudos: 207





	1. Emotion

**Author's Note:**

> This is a concept I've been nursing for five years (ikr)
> 
> It's taken lockdown to finally get me to write it. 
> 
> This is Chapter 1/3 of Part 1. 
> 
> Huge thanks go out to reydjarinkenobi and star-caps who are betaing this beast for me. They are wonderful and any mistakes that remain are me, trying to be stylish (probably).

[ ](https://gifyu.com/image/W2BS)

**△ 1. Emotion ▽**

His limbs feel heavy, as though he is fighting through mud... or something thicker. A cry from the darkness resounds through his head, vibrating through the marrow of his bones. The sound of a voice in pain.

His teeth grind together as he searches, calls out through the darkness. He can’t see, only feel. He is growing closer, struggling forwards. Something passes him, close enough to ghost against his skin but not quite touching. He can’t see them but they are so near.

If he could just reach...

He sees him. The tired face - features, blurry, swimming out of the darkness. Nameless. Twisted against the pain tearing through his head, he sees him scream, clawing at the back of his head, mask of pain contorting into one of determination: a cold, empty determination. A face at his side, pale skin and an eternity of dark hair, soothing, holding the man. Her eyes shift to him and see into him, her gaze searing and he cries out as it burns through his core. Her own scream joins his, agony ripping across her soft features.

Something surrounds him, but he cannot see it. It’s screaming at him; louder than everything else but without words or noise. Another shout joins the cacophony. His head feels like it will split open. 

Another face - Anakin’s - seething and contorted with rage surges towards him. He can feel his shout through his chest. It cuts through him. Then the darkness shatters. 

Ben Lars slams the hydrospanner onto the table. 

“This isn’t happening,” he declares with a dismissive sigh. Shirking his sleeve to cover his oily hand, he rubs his forehead. He has been working on the damn thing for a week now. If only the Empire wasn’t so cheap, he wouldn’t have to spend his time fixing substandard weaponry. 

Lumi’s head emerges from the coiling wires of machinery. “Boss isn’t going to take that for an answer, Ben.” She raises an eyebrow, eyes scanning over her work a moment longer before placing them knowingly on him. “You know that, as well as I do.” 

“Well, the Boss can go blast herself,” Ben snarks, climbing down from the peak of the ion tank. He crosses to the table covered in a messy array of mechanical gear and bypasses all of it for an already oil-streaked cloth. It takes the dirt and sweat off in a single wipe. He finishes dusting off his hands and throws the towel back in the vicinity of the table. It tumbles to the ground. 

“You say that now,” Lumi answers around a grunt. She is deep inside the inner workings of the tank, her voice strangely muffled, echoing. “But will you say that when she gets here?”

Ben gives a gruff huff in response and runs his hands through his cropped hair. A glance to the chrono on the wall high above the workshop floor sentences him to another three hours of struggling with the hulking machine. He presses his teeth together in frustration - a flash of memory - darkness, heavy limbs; from a dream. He squints, grasping for its tail, but it’s already out of reach. 

“Come on, I think I’ve fixed the turn-over issue here,” Lumi offers, climbing out of the machine. She flicks her dreads back over her shoulder. “It might help things along on your end.”

Ben doesn’t hear her, his mind lingering on a far-away place. Lumi glances to him, recognising the vacant expression and shakes her head. “Ben!” 

Her tone snaps him unpleasantly back to the present. “What?” Ben questions. 

“This monster has to be back out in the field by the beginning of next week,” Lumi chastens. “It’s not all that bad; we’ve just got to make her sing again.” Her smile is relaxed, while her startling blue eyes search his face but Ben sees the edges of it falter. “What’s the matter with you these days? It’s like you’re off somewhere else in your head.”

Ben nods, dropping his eyes to the blackened floor. “Sorry, Lumi. I suppose I am.” He heaves a deep sigh again, sucking in the fumes and gases of the workshop around him. “I think I’ve had my fill of the mechanical for this lifetime.”

“You’ve only been here two years,” Lumi laughs, turning to grab a laser cutter from the table. She returns to the tank, climbing atop her harsh lines and edges and delving into the cold centre once more. 

Ben frowns. “It doesn’t feel like it.” He steels himself and climbs reluctantly into the bowels of the machine. 

If the workday is bad, the walk home is even worse. Ben endeavours to make his trek through the lower levels back to the Galactic City as pleasurable as possible but the garish neons do little for fume-induced headaches. He inhales the recycled air and allows his eyes to roam the swarming nightlife. Myriad foreign creatures jostle and swagger their way through the bustling crowds that make up the lower pleasure districts. At least there is a buzzing sense of joviality to be found here that is scarce on the rest of the planet. 

Tonight, the populace seems to be particularly boisterous. Ben slips into the middle of the street to avoid the queues for innumerable clubs and pulls his dark jacket closer to hide his oil stained shirt. On the lower levels, every day was Zhellday. He shuffles his pack further up his shoulder and makes his way through the district..

His legs ache from crouching in the blasted ion tank all day and for once he’s glad of the long walk home to stretch them out again. Lumi’s grin slips into his head as he boards a portal ship ascending to the Galactic City. He has no idea how the Mirialan is able to maintain her joviality. Perhaps she was always meant to be a mechanic, unlike him. He wonders if her chipper attitude is what fulfilment looks like from the outside as he steps into the throng of the bright upper level. 

He glances left, side-stepping an inebriated Togruta male and sees her. Dark hair and a slight frame, slipping between the crowds. 

The woman. The one he sees every night when he closes his eyes. Soothing, searching, scorching through him. 

But not today. Among the frivolous denizens of Coruscant - here, today, she is well, moving through the crowd like a shadow. Their eyes meet - a fleeting second, her gaze cooler than in his dreams. Then a flick of braided hair and she is gone. 

It stops him dead. There, in the centre of the street, staring after her like a stunned gooberfish. 

He blinks. 

Something thuds into his back. Ben stumbles forwards. A weighty Kitonak splurges a tirade of complaint and rumbles past. He sidesteps the creature’s bulk and searches the crowd ahead. A sea of lifeforms, gurgling and singing and twittering but no woman. The crowds have swallowed her. 

His bag is knocked off his shoulder by a passing man with a growl of frustration. There is no pausing Coruscant. He stumbles forwards, re-joining the ceaseless flow; but, it feels like there is no life left in his legs. 

His mind races while his feet stumble. His eyes search every face, every strand of hair but it is as if the woman has evaporated. Even the crowd that swallowed her has been swallowed itself by other lifeforms. He clatters onwards, buffeted by the throng, eyes now frantically searching the mostly humanoid masses ahead. It’s not until he’s streets away as the crowds ease that he realises that he’s missed his turn-off for home. He has left the packed walkways of the Entertainment District and stumbled into Coco Town, the dilapidated Commerce District.

He has never come this way before. Glancing around, he searches for a skyway towards the Skydome, which will at least give him a pleasant journey home to the Upper Residential District, if a much longer one. It’s then that he catches sight of the old Temple. The single Coruscanti sun has only just sunk beneath the skylanes and plazas of the ecumenopolis, but the ruins of the Jedi Temple - towering, even in their disrepair - still catch the final glints of light. His usual route to work takes him past it’s walls, but he has never seen it like this before; from afar. It grabs him for a moment; something in his centre sticking, like a thorn catching robes and tugging him back. 

It’s been four years since the Empire’s ascendance had purged the Temple of Jedi. Ben could remember seeing the smoke pouring from the between the spires and billowing across the Coruscanti atmosphere for miles. Days later, an even darker smoke arose as the thousands of slaughtered Jedi and their lightsabers were piled high and burnt at dawn; as traitors to both the Republic and the new Galactic Empire. The fire had raged for weeks afterwards and continued to pepper the sky with ash and dust for miles across the city. He remembers those days as one always remembers living history; in vivid spots and patches, accompanied by a sense of momentousness but otherwise dissociated from emotion. And yet now, as he looks at the winking spires bathed in orange he feels an unease. _A temple to treason and hypocrisy_ , Anakin’s voice echoes in his head. 

He shakes it off. Clearly, he has been thrown off kilter by the woman in the crowd. It must be mere coincidence; a woman who resembled the one in his dream and his mind has simply replaced her face. The discomfort seeping through his body, beneath his skin had caused the ruined Temple to appear menacing in the half-light of the dying day. 

He moves across the street, passing a run-down diner that looks as though it has been there since before the Temple itself was built. He is late and adds some urgency to his step as he descends a stairwell back into the city, feeling the ruined monument to a dead age watching him until he disappears from sight. 

  
He flattens his palm to the access scanner and sighs with relief as the door slides aside, admitting him to their small apartment. They pay an extortionate amount of credits for it every month but Anakin is determined they will live in the Upper Residential District and not the lower, despite the man’s meagre wage from the Imperial Police. 

Before his bag even hits the expensive carpet - “Where have you been? You’re over an hour late!”

Ben sighs in submission. “I know, I’m sorry.”

Anakin’s form fills the entry doorway. He hasn’t even removed his body armour or weapons belt. “Are you alright?” He is angry, attempting to hide it beneath worry. But he has never been emotionally adept. 

“Yes, fine,” Ben walks to him, shrugging off his jacket and uncharacteristically dropping it on the entryway chair. “I’m sorry I worried you.” He rubs his hands along Anakin’s long arms, soothing. It does nothing to dispel the deep frown and severe brow that Anakin directs down to him. 

“Where were you?” he repeats, seemingly searching his face for the answer. 

Ben breaks the younger man’s intense gaze with a squeeze of his arms and skirts past him into the living area. The room is devoid of warmth; the lights are off, the blinds wide open from the day and kitchen dark and deserted. He busies himself with remedying this. Anakin never had been one for homemaking. He swallows a sigh. “I was distracted on the way home - took a wrong turn and ended up in the Commerce-”

“-distracted by what?” he breaks in. 

Ben flicks on a corner light, warming the room. “Someone I thought I knew.”

“From where?” Anakin asks, quickly, urgently.

Ben frowns “You’re not even changed - how long have you been home for?” He nods to Anakin’s blaster hanging by his hip.

“A while - I was worried.”

“Your gloves are still on,” Ben grimaces. In fact, Anakin is still in full Security Force uniform. He looks ready to take on an underworld riot, rather than his partner.

“Who did you see?”

Ben grunts in confusion; “No one. I thought I recognised someone in the crowd but… it was a mistake,” he offers, thumbing the blinds on the wall and moving to the cramped kitchen. “I see you didn’t start dinner.”

“I had no idea when you were coming back, Ben - I thought I was going to have to go out and look for you,” Anakin says storming his own way after him into the now over-attended room. “As usual, you weren’t answering your comm.”

Ben reaches into the pod on his belt and pulls out his comm - dead. 

“Of course it’s dead,” Anakin announces. “It’s always dead.”

“It’s when I’m inside the tanks - you know this. It searches for signal all day and it drains the battery.” He sets it aside on the counter and busies himself in the cooler. “If we were able to afford better-”

  
“-Yes I know. If we spent less money on this ridiculous apartment we could afford better comm units; always the same.”

Ben scoffs, his head deep enough inside the cooler for it to be lost to the ice. “It’s true,” he shrugs, pulling out some kind of vegetable that looks only half-off. 

“You need to be more careful.” Anakin asserts. He has placed himself in the centre of the already tiny space, legs wide and arms crossed, the way Ben imagines he does after storming a spice den. But his voice is dangerous and Ben knows better than to make fun of him now. They’re moments away from this heated conversation escalating into a nuclear row. 

Ben throws the dying vegetable onto the counter and moves towards the man. “I’m sorry I worried you. But I’m a grown man, Anakin, I can take care of myself in the middle of a city,” he takes Anakin’s good hand in his, holds it between them and gently massages away the tension. Anakin’s eyes watch his fingers. His stance relaxes, imperceptibly to anyone but Ben. 

“It’s dangerous out there; there are more uprisings than we’ve seen since the Purge.”

“I know.”

“There are more and more Rebel factions springing up every day.” Ben can see the turmoil raging in his eyes - he is still cross; furious in fact, but Ben has always been able to defuse him. 

“I know, my love. It must be difficult knowing every awful thing that happens out there.” Anakin’s gloved fingers brush at the short beard along his jaw, but Ben knows he is listening. “I didn’t realise the time. I’ll try to remember to leave my comm on the workshop floor during the day, alright?”

“Hmm,” Anakin’s eyes follow his fingers and steps closer, presses in.

“Anakin - I’m covered in oil.”

“I know,” he murmurs, voice already deep and murky while his other hand slides to the small of Ben’s back pulling him near. The prosthesis is unmistakable: cold and hard against his skin even through the leather glove and his shirt. He steps forward, his taller form making Ben stumble his back against the cooler which rattles noisily at the onslaught. 

Anakin is all hard armour and steel against him and he knows this is the other man’s way of winning; of making a point. 

“You’ll ruin your uniform,” he warns futilely. He is tired and his legs still ache but he knows Anakin needs this and he can’t ignore his own interest as it grows in the pit of his stomach the more Anakin presses against him. 

Anakin’s real hand, still gloved, is sliding into his hair, slowly, tenderly. Then it closes on a handful of copper and twists roughly, pulling Ben’s head back. His eyes screw shut and he hears the crack of his head hitting the cooler. He opens them and finds his gaze locked with Anakin’s. The man’s expression is wolfish; handsome mouth pulling up at the corner, pleased with himself. 

“Then take it off.”

He raises an eyebrow, but Ben can feel his heart begin to thud in his chest as his fingers move deliberately to Anakin’s belt. He has always been unpredictable and Ben’s life is filled with enough monotony for twelve lifetimes. Anakin is a dangerous glitter of wildness; tumultuous disturbance. 

“You haven’t kissed me hello yet,” Anakin murmurs, teasing the tip of his nose along Ben’s bearded cheek. He tilts his hips back, allowing Ben’s fingers to release his belt. “Don’t drop it,” he orders needlessly. The blaster’s weight makes for a heady reminder of the need for care and as Anakin’s other arm comes up to rest beside Ben’s head, he realises he has been caught; arms around the taller man’s back, gripping the weight of the armed belt. Anakin’s hips roll forward, pressing him back harder, the fridge cold against his back through the thin, worn fabric of his work shirt. 

Anakin’s head lowers to trail his wetted lips beneath his ear. The hand in his hair tilts his head to the side to allow Anakin to lay an open-mouthed kiss to his bare stretch of neck; then another, long and slow to his throat. His teeth nip the line of his jaw through his beard and Ben’s hands tighten their grip on the belt. 

The hand in his hair loosens and begins to massage his head and Ben notices it's cold counterpart coming to rest at his collarbone, slipping beneath the loose neck of his cotton shirt and meeting his warm skin. 

Anakin’s kiss comes suddenly and harshly. His lips are pressed apart and his mouth raided by Anakin’s tongue, thrusting and searching and a sharp thrill trills through his centre that comes from a place he never recognises. He returns the kiss, using the belt to pull Anakin tighter against him until he can barely breathe against the body armour. He feels a leg pressing between his own, spreading his feet further apart and dropping him even lower as though their height difference was not already enough. 

Anakin’s hand moves around and takes his belt from Ben’s gripping fingers. 

“Seems you’ve got more work to do,” he drawls lowly, setting the belt on the counter beside the long-discarded vegetable. He flicks his head minutely, urging Ben’s hands to their task. 

“This is why you didn’t take it off yourself then,” Ben intones up to him. Anakin’s steady smirk doesn’t waver as he trails his gloved fingertips over Ben’s lips. The buckles at his sides are unusually stiff but Ben’s fingers are dexterous and determined. He twists his arms uncomfortably past Anakin’s casual stance to reach the shoulder straps, as he knows is the man’s intention. As he unclips them he begins to wonder at his own allowing of such blatant dominance after tonight’s events; it is not always like this between them, but it seems there are times when Anakin craves him in a certain way. Perhaps it is not wise to encourage this behaviour after arguing for his independence moments before, but he also knows that in some insidious way, which he doesn’t quite understand, it also earns Anakin’s trust. As though proving that his lateness, his absence, does not equal his ambivalence or his disengagement - in fact, the opposite. 

He knows as the hand at his collar pushes him to his knees on the kitchen floor, that the next time he is home late, Anakin will not ask. 

He presses Obi-Wan to the ground before him and waits as the man undoes the rest of his uniform. For a moment, his words flicker through his head - _someone I thought I knew… it was a mistake_ \- but then he feels warm lips wrap around his length and everything else shatters from his mind. He grunts as Obi-Wan takes the full length of him at once, curls a fist in the man’s hair and holds him there; face buried between his legs as he breathes and groans. This was more than he ever could have hoped for. 

He releases his head and impatiently tears his glove off his hand with his teeth, discarding it to the side before feeding his fingers through those soft strands, dirtied with oil and darkened by days away from the sun, buried in the guts of tanks and underground droid workshops. 

As Anakin feels Obi-Wan's tongue flatten languidly along his length he sees flashes of the light gold and burnished chestnut tones that have now been replaced by rusty brown. Obi-Wan is dimming, his light is being gradually smothered - day by day, but as he begins to thrust forwards and back, rocking in and out of the man’s mouth, he cannot bring himself to care. 


	2. Yet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for your lovely comments!

▲ 2. Yet ▽

That morning, Anakin had kissed him goodbye the way they used to kiss five years ago. He knelt on the edge of the bed, still naked from the night before, sheets tangled in his long legs and pulled Ben against him, kissing him as a drowning man gasps for air. 

He can still feel the ghost of his fingertips on his neck as he trudges through the commuter throng. For the first time in a long time, as he watches his feet step one in the front of the other, his mind is not on the vagaries of his life nor the mechanical frustrations that may lie ahead with Lumi at the factory but on Anakin’s lips and fingertips and smirk. The thoughts are so uncommon that it is almost as though they have been placed there. Last night, he had not awoken from his usual shallow sleep to the sounds of screams ringing in his ears and unnamed faces swimming before his eyes. He slept soundly, dreamlessly and in the morning, he forgets about the woman from the crowd; from his dreams.

“You look like you’ve been on sabbatical!” Lumi exclaims as he marches towards him across the workshop. She’s got the day’s manifest order in her hands and her customary extra large mug of caf. “What did you do?”

“Had a good night’s sleep for once,” he replies, glaring jealously at her caf and dutifully remembering to put his comm on the workbench. “What have we got for today?”

“Ah, more of the usual,” she shrugs, her accent curling around the words. “Just sleep then, that’s all?” she smirks, throwing the manifest onto the workbench and sipping her caf without taking her penetrating eyes off him.

He’s not able to repress his own smirk at her audacity and acumen. “Are you really so invested in me getting kriffed?” he asks, unable to keep the laugh from his voice. 

“You’re a damn sight less grumpy than usual, that’s all I’m saying,” Lumi shrugs, her eyebrows so innocently high they almost join her hairline. She takes another swig of caf and turns away. 

He begins to flick through the manifest while Lumi straps on her utility belt and pins back her dreads. 

“More AATs,” he huffs. “If Baktoid engineered these better in the first place we wouldn’t have to spend so much time fixing them.”

“And then we would be out of a job so long live Baktoid, I say,” Lumi quips, waving to the maintenance droids to open the hangar doors and bring in the day’s labours. 

Ben watches as she comms the droids and tells them how to arrange the shipments in the workshop. Lumi has always been the cheerful, optimistic kind. She has an infectious energy and an audacious confidence that Ben has always admired. But how does someone so vibrant and vivacious end up spending their days deep in the bowels of poorly engineered armaments? 

“How do you do it, Lumi?” it slips out before he realises. As she turns, he looks to his feet, embarrassed by his outburst.

“Do what?” she asks before her head snaps to the side. “No, over there!” she shouts back to BLX-17 who has always been useless. She turns back to him, seemingly intrigued by his question rather than disconcerted.

“Work here,” he flicks his eyes around the huge, gloomy space - the grey, blast-burnt walls, the oil stained floors, the harsh lights that make him forget what time of day it is; that make sunlight seem soft and rosy after a day slogging beneath their artificial phosphorescence. He leans against the table and crosses his arms protectively across his chest. “And stay… well- you.”

“Oh, Ben,” she sighs, walking back towards him. She places a green hand on his shoulder, squeezing. Her smile is wistful. “It’s not so bad here, is it?” 

There is a crash from behind her as one repulsor tank gets reversed into another: one more repair to add to the list. 

“It just doesn’t seem like…” he pauses and looks up toward the garish lights, “where I’m meant to be.” He moves his hands to the unravelling hem of his shirt, the blue thread trailing erratically across his belt. He twirls the wayward zig-zags tightly around a finger. “I’m sorry that sounds like a rather colossal delusion of grandeur.”

“No - I think all of us feel like that from time to time,” Lumi muses, leaning beside him. She looks unseeingly out into the chaotic workshop. “But this is a good job - a rare one.” He nods without looking up from the thread around his middle finger, watches as the tip of it starts to lose circulation. “We’re not stuck on some mindless production line with a bunch of metal-headed droids. It’s not hard labour though the days are long - and we get to use our skills for things even droids can’t fix. We’re in a rare pocket of work, Ben.”

“Of course,” he nods. “It’s just…” he looks across the workshop to their day’s work stretching before them. 

“What?” Lumi prompts - she seems devotedly engaged in what feels like his mid-life crisis, he thinks. 

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re stuck? Like you’re not really going anywhere?” Speaking the words aloud, he feels his muscles releasing a tension he didn’t realise he had been holding for months. “Don’t you feel as though we’ve been put in a box here and left to solder and wrench the rest of our days away to oblivion?”

Lumi chuckles softly but not unkindly at the extremity of his words. “That’s bleak.”

He gives a snort at his own melancholy. “I suppose it is rather.”

“I know there aren’t exactly myriad promotion opportunities but I know you don’t want to end up behind a holodesk either.” Lumi motions up to the galleries of administrative offices lining the workshop. “I can’t imagine you in formal robes and meetings all day.”

“No, you’re right. Of course you’re right.” 

They work their way speedily through the manifest that morning and Ben tries to put his conversation with Lumi out of his head. Unfortunately, working with his hands always seems to give him time to think and he can’t help his mind whirring away as he repairs AAT after STAP after AAT. His fingertips trip over blaster-pocked metal and he imagines the worlds,the species, the battles and the parsecs between him and them. His thoughts wander to the Battle of Coruscant; the closest he has ever been to any kind of warfare save repairing weapons-grade mechanics. He remembers standing on the deserted parapets of the Skydome, Anakin’s warm hand grasping his as they both gazed up at the elegant blooms of distant explosions and scars of laser-fire across the sky. Sirens and Imperial Police vehicles screamed overhead directing everyone inside but they stayed there, out in the open throughout the night and watched the fireworks painting death across the skies. Both he and Anakin knew that if anything were to come crashing planetside, being burrowed in their tiny apartment would do nothing to protect them. No; if a destroyer was going to burn its way through the artificial atmosphere and come tearing to the Coruscanti surface they would much rather see their end coming than be blinkered like a pair of tethered banthas to slaughter. 

He shunts the final piece of armoured cladding on to the side of the final multi-troop transport and taps it out of the manifest. The transport adds itself to the list of completed repairs and the datapad buzzes:

_Shipment Complete_

“That’s us loaded, Lumi,” he calls, handing the datapad to BLX-17. “I’m going to head out, see if I can beat the traffic home.” He throws on his jacket and pack offering an absent wave to the Mirialan as he leaves. 

  
The streets are a little quieter, but “quiet” for Coruscant is still “heaving” anywhere else. He’s going to head straight home, take a sonic shower and pour a large measure of that single-malt Corellian whiskey that Bant got him last year. 

It surely is no coincidence that it happens right by the walls of the old Temple. He has his eyes on his feet, walking behind a group of young Niktos when he hears the commotion. Imperial Police have an unmistakable sound; the vocoders in their armoured helmets wildly distorting their human voices into something mechanical and cold. 

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!”

He can’t help but look up through the crowd. The officers are gathered in a widening circle, trotting backward from whatever they are shouting at. There are sounds of dismay from the crowd; groups stopping in the street, couples staggering from the paths of retreating police. 

“Stop where you are!” A further chorus of shouts and Ben tries to shoulder his way past the gathering crowd. It’s not unusual for there to be public misdemeanours in this section of town and he knows well enough that it’s better to ignore them than get enthralled in what could turn into one of the riots Anakin was annoyingly mentioning last night. 

“You are breaking Section Eight of the Imperial Cultural Decree!”

“What the hell does she think she’s doing?” rumbles a Nemoidian from behind him. “Here of all places?”

“Get on the ground now!”

“Stop, stop what you’re doing, stop it! Get your hands on the ground!”

The tension is thickening but Ben is almost through. There are four 501-Z police droid units powering mercilessly into the throng to back up the officers. Ben knows whatever this is, it will be all over Anakin’s comm channels. And he’ll know it’s on Ben’s route home. He resolves to comm him when he gets back to the apartment. The droid voices join the din. 

“Remain calm and clear the area.”

He is almost past the throng when a huge male Togruta blocks his path trying to shove to the front of the gathering crowd. He twists to squeeze past. His eyes catch the flash of sunlight on a rifle and his eyes fall to a gap between shoving bodies to the centre of the panic. 

He is unsure why, but his throat tightens at the sight of the tattered cream tunics. The soft, light fabric is shredded and blackened. It hangs loosely, ill-fitting on the young Bothan. They are not her robes. She stumbles, unseeing, unreactive to the commands thrown at her. 

“Get on the ground or you will be removed!”

“In accordance with Section Eight of the Imperial Cultural Act, if you do not comply, you will be terminated.”

Ben isn’t aware of moving towards the conflict until he is close enough to evaluate the Bothan as unarmed, injured and low-threat. The words cycle through his mind unbidden. The part of him not consumed by the sight of those clothes in this place wonders at them.

The crowd has turned. They begin to jeer. He does not note the complaints and growls of those he pushes out of the way. He has dropped his bag. He doesn’t remember when. His legs are strong, knees gently bent. He pushes through, eyes locked on the Bothan’s face. She stumbles, falls to her knees. Shouts rise. 

“Don’t move!”

“Stay where you are!”

“Please cooperate and follow officer instructions. Remain calm,” the droids intone. 

She has fallen into a loose, seated posture. Her head lolls, eyes sliding closed and she becomes still. Her hands rest on her knees. 

“Cease all religious occupation,” the droids begin to enforce. 

“Get your hands, on, the, ground!” 

She is a gross mockery of meditation. It only enrages the crowd further. They are becoming a mob. The unwelcome nostalgia of a little-understood Jedi practice sends unease rippling through the watchers. Somewhere, outside of himself he feels the prickle of their irritation, but it is a shadow. He is through the crowd now. What his body plans to do, he has no idea. He has had no say in its choices for the last ninety seconds. 

“That’s enough.” He steps inside the circle of police and droids. 

There is a moment of suspension - a breath. Then: “PILGRIM”. 

The call sign rattles around the circle at high-speed between the officers, a chirped “Roger” from the droids. The intensity reaches unfound heights; more than he had expected for a simple interference. 

Rifles whir with charge, swing towards him. Yells are levelled at him. They reform, widen. The crowd is pushed back. They encircle him. He sees the flick of a wrist calling reinforcements. Gradually, he moves towards the Bothan, keeps his steps slow, deliberate. Predictable. His hands at waist height, palms out. His mind is clear: clean of distraction. “There is no need; she is unwell.”

“Step back! Step away now!”

“Do not engage with the offender. Please step away.” The droids’ eyes are empty, fixed on him. 

“Leave her be, she has done nothing wrong.” He does not know where his voice is coming from but it is calm.

“Get away from her!”

He has put himself between her and them. Behind him, the Bothan and the Temple wall. In front, there are five Imperial Police, four droid units. All weapons are locked on him. He is unarmed. He feels the moment in his core. Seconds away. 

“I mean no harm.” He looks directly in the armoured eyes of an officer. Behind the opaque lenses he sees panic. Feels it crackling off the being. “Leave her be.”

It is…

“Get away from her!”

Now.

The time ticks itself out at his centre. He moves to the side before the bolt leaves the officer’s rifle. The lean becomes a step; forward, hand circling quickly around the outside and down. Fingers around the barrel. A tug forwards, the officer pulled, sprawling into his already waiting kick. His finger now around the trigger. One shot across the circle, skimming above the Bothan’s head, finds its mark in the first droid’s CPU. Its head erupts in smoke. 

The gravel is rough against his hands as he ducks a barrage of blaster bolts, while spinning a trip to the officer who runs at him from behind. A shot to the first officer’s right hip and they’re down. 

Behind him. 

His elbow swings back. 

He grunts; it meets solid armour but the officer is still winded. He grabs them for a shield, dodging another blaster bolt. A kick to the head of the grounded officer and they’re down. The droids’ fire tears open the officer he has pulled against him. Two more of his own shots take one droid down, the second bolt glances off. He throws the downed man off him into the droid behind. 

A leap into the air, tucking his head as he spins, blaster fire threading between his spiralling legs carries him across to the missed droid. His leg tucks behind the droid’s spindly limb as the heel of his hand travels upward into its mechanical excuse for a chin. The protective casing ruptures at the force of his blow. He grabs at the exposed wiring in the droid’s throat and tears it out as it tumbles backwards. 

Another duck dodges panicked fire. He sends his last bolt into the droid trapped beneath the officer he had used for a shield. Before turning quickly to propel the rifle, like a boomerang into the panicked officer’s eye lenses. They shatter and his modulated grunt of pain is aberrant. 

The bolt of the final officer misses but their punch lands. He absorbs it as much as he can, locks the pain away. Takes a breath, takes the arm; too slow to retract, twists it, shunts it up, feels ligament tear. Foot into the side of a knee, the kneecap shifts and the officer crumples to an armoured heap at his feet. 

The crowd is silent. He has time for one inhalation before guttural sirens growl to life above. He turns to the Bothan. She is stood; stumbles away from him but not in sickness. Her eyes are clear now, fixed on him, snout tasting the air warily. There is something in her eyes that Ben almost grasps but she turns and is disappeared in a flurry of charred tan robes through the simmering crowd. He hears rhythmic clanking and knows in his bones that it's a full company of droids approaching. 

Time for some self-preservation. It is in that instant that his body relinquishes control back to his mind and he has no idea what to do. Except run. 


	3. Peace

**▲ 3. Peace ▼**

His quivering legs carry him down a rotten alley off the main street. The crowd he left behind has erupted again and their braying masks any indication of where the droid company might be. He can hear his heart, previously steady and regular during the fight begin to pound in his ears. 

For a moment, as he runs, his brain shuts down and he can feel panic begin to crawl its way up his throat. It tastes like acid, bile, burning at the back of his mouth and he gasps a breath of rancid, back-alley air.

He turns a corner into another equally dead-beat passage, stumbles over sprawling refuse and mechanical parts. His chest is tight, but it is not weariness; it is terror. 

He ducks through a spluttering electro-fence and belts around a corner. It’s a main thoroughfare - too exposed. The sirens wail here too. His eyes flicker ineptly over the buildings opposite. His now thundering heart almost stops as his eyes land on the holoboard stretching twelve-storeys high with his face flashed across it, signalling a yellow alert. His stonily calm expression and his hand gripping a discharging blaster rifle. 

F U G I T I V E W A R N I N G  
BEN LARS  
DANGEROUS, UNSTABLE, CURRENTLY AT LARGE  
DO NOT APPROACH

 _Kark._ He dashes unseeingly across the street causing a street-cleaning hover-droid to squeal in consternation. Into the alley, this one with backdoors spilling into the scummy passage. Waifs malingering in doorways glare at him. Busy, so many eyes. 

He scrambles down the first turn-off he sees. A slim entryway between two rows of commercial buildings. Skidding to a halt, he flattens himself to the dripping wall behind a vapor unit. Forces himself to stop. Thinks about where in the city he is, considers the direction of the alleys he has taken. Breathes, tries to slow himself. 

“Separating and flanking.” 

The mechanical voice echoes down the adjoining alley - where he came from. The droids are close. 

He squeezes his eyes shut. A moment of darkness. A beat and it reignites whatever overcame him in the street by the Temple wall. A coolness; serenity seeps through his bones. His brain re-engages, frighteningly efficient from nowhere.

He is two skyblocks from the Temple. The sirens will wail through the streets for a five-block radius. He has moved west of the ruins through the Old Temple District. _Kriffing hells_ , he curses himself. He’s run like a frightened krugga deer straight into the Inquisitorius Precinct. After publicly defending a skrag dressed as a Jedi outside the old Temple he may as well have handed himself to the Empire on the steps of Arrth-Eno. 

He needs to get off the streets; get off these streets in particular. There is nowhere for him to go except back to the apartment. The Imperial Police will have already matched him to his Identichip, but the apartment is in Anakin’s name, not his own. 

“Anakin,” he breathes. Anakin will know what to do. He probably already knows. 

First, he needs to make it back to the Residential District without being seen. A moment to listen, nothing. He pushes off the wall and strides the length of the alleyway, shirking his jacket and throwing it behind some cans of hyperfuel. He heads for a door that looks rickety and loose. Tries the handle; it opens. He slips inside just as two police droids round the corner. They miss the quiet click of the door closing behind him. 

He is in the back corridors of a soulless administrative building. His legs seem to carry him through the halls with an impossibly direct confidence. This building will connect to the upper skylanes. He passes an open doorway to an office, reaches in and grabs a light jacket and dark scarf. There is a turbolift across the hall; at the centre of the building. Engages it to take him to the highest level with a punch of the holopad and pulls on his acquired garments. He exits into a small ante chamber, warning signs plastered on the walls about skylane traffic and slipstream winds. He barrels through the door ahead and finds himself on the roof. As he unknowingly suspected, there is a skeletal ladder reaching to the next level of skyblocks. 

From here he can hear the echoing of the wailing sirens for kilometres, the guttural whining creating an unearthly chorus around him. It doesn’t seem to dissuade his resolved body from climbing onto the rungs and scaling the adjoining skyblock. 

He is heading back into the Works District. This skyblock is directly adjacent to the first large factory on the edge of the district. He pushes his legs on as he crosses the roof of the block, easily leaping the minute distance to the factory roof. 

He moves, unseen, through the factory eaves, from one to the next until he reaches the glittering Financial District. The sirens have receded to a muffled buzzing in the distance. Sure feet and intrepid hands carry him back to street level and he calmly joins the flow of commuter traffic now spilling out of the administrative skyblocks. He will be difficult to spot now in the rush of workers. Steady flows of traders and brokers carry him seamlessly past the Senate Buildings. As he walks he refuses to interrogate whatever power is moving him safely through the city. The closer to home he gets, the more he feels the unsettling roil of panic beneath his inexplicable calm. 

He is only two blocks away now. He clenches his jaw as he pushes past a grumpy Rodian to finally pass out of sight of the military buildings facing the Imperial Palace across the Central Skylane. The residential blocks rise up around him like welcoming arms. Two more turns and he is home. 

Whatever peace he found back in the alleyway - he loses as he dashes down the corridor to their apartment. He slams a sweaty palm against the scanner and shoulders through the door before it fully opens. 

The holonews reverberates around their small apartment. Ben jogs across the entryway and into the living space. At the sound of his footsteps, Anakin stands from the sofa. He is wearing one of Ben’s old sleepshirts, worn and now almost see-through. It threatens to slip off his shoulder. The man’s face is painted with concern and he looks young; so young. 

“Ben, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he answers, moving immediately to the window and glancing down through the dizzying skylanes of traffic. Pinpricks of light shoot back and forth through the pulsing half-light of the city. 

He has walked past Anakin’s opened arms but the man has not followed him nor voiced complaint. He forces himself to breathe. Now that he is returned control of his body it seems he has to make special effort for even basic life-processes. 

“I saw the holonews,” Anakin turns, mouth agape to stare at the program; live securi-cam footage of guardian droids patrolling a holo-roped crime scene. Then, rolling recordings of the tussle in the street - and it looks like little more than that. From the angle, it’s difficult to make out Ben’s face and the push and pull between him and an officer looks like a confused brawl as the footage dances between cams around the buildings. “I don’t understand - this is a mistake.”

“There’s no mistake.” He tears off his stolen clothes, leaving himself in fraying blue cotton. 

“Ben they’re saying someone attacked three officers in the street-”

  
“-Three?” he cuts in. “No. And I didn’t attack them.”

“Well, if it was you, it looks like you did attack in these vids,” Anakin gestures almost helplessly at the holo. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“I don’t think I am,” he shakes his head. He wants to move forward, step into Anakin and let the galaxy melt away but he steps away instead; runs a nervous hand through cropped hair. 

“It’s okay, Ben - whatever this is we can repair it,” he moves across the space to him. His eyes are warm but something about him makes Ben want to retreat further. 

“It wasn’t three men - it was five; as well as droids. Four 501-Z droids,” Ben stammers between breaths. 

A small smile spreads across Anakin’s face; he shakes his head. “You took down almost ten Imperial Security operatives?”

“Yes,” Ben looks to his hands. “I don’t know how but it was like my hands were doing it on their own.”

“Ben, there are only three officers in this footage and,” he glances to the holonet again before stepping forwards and taking Ben’s face in his hands. His skin is warm; almost burning. “Why? Why would you even do such a thing?” 

Ben stares at the bared skin beneath Anakin’s stolen shirt. 

“There was a Jedi.”

“A what?” Anakin’s voice hardens but his hands don’t lower. Ben shifts his weight uncomfortably. 

“I mean… she wasn’t a Jedi,” he raises his hands to Anakin’s at either side of his head and takes them, pulls them down to rest between them. “She wore robes.”

“What has that got to do with anything?” an edge to his voice, subtle but present. Impatience.

“She needed help. She was ill; they were going to shoot her.”

“What, a Jedi defector?” Anakin spits. 

“She wasn’t a-”

“-and you thought you were the one to stop it?” He is incredulous, swinging Ben’s hands open. 

“Yes - no one else was going to,” he defends. “Though it was less of a decision and more…”

“More what?”

Ben drops Anakin’s hands and moves into the centre of the room. His elbow throbs suddenly from when he drove it into hard-plated body armour. He presses seeking fingers to it; grimaces, face away from his partner. 

“It was like it happened without me.” He turns, resolved. 

“They say the attacker was stopped for a routine Identichip check,” Anakin gestures with his chin to the news once more. As though it is a more reputable source for the incident than Ben. 

A deep unease stirs in his chest. “The man? Why don’t you believe it was me? There are holoboards plastered across the city with my face and name, listing me as a wanted felon.”

“They have no idea who has done this - the suspect is unidentified, Ben!”

“Why are you not listening to what I’m telling you?”

“This is all just a mistake,” Anakin tries but he has never been skilled at reassurance. “Evil things happen around that building all the time. I’ve told you to take the other route home. There’s bad energy there-”

“- I would say so,” he cuts in. He never cuts in. 

“Something has happened to you - you’re confused-”

“-I’m not confused about anything.”

“There’s no way you could take down that many operatives - you’d be dead in the dust. What did you do, hit them with your screwdriver?” He tries to take Ben’s hands in his own once more but Ben throws him off. 

“Listen, it’s what happened. I know it sounds… wrong and I don’t understand how but it’s the truth.” It’s not the reaction that Ben had hoped for, disbelief, but it presses a realisation to the forefront of his mind. “We have to leave.”

“What? Leave?” Anakin has gone icily cold. 

He remembers the callsign jolting around the circle, the one that had set them all on high alert. “They knew me.”

He watches the face in front of him drain of emotion. 

“They knew me and for some reason it made them attack.”

“How would they know you? You’re delusional.” It is thrown across the room; an attempt at casual but it fails and hits like a punch. 

“I know what I’m saying. They saw me and-”

“-I don’t want to hear… anymore, about them.” Anakin is almost imperceptibly advancing. The movement as measured as the words. 

“We have to leave,” Ben tries but his voice is small; the hope has gone out of it. 

“You’re not going anywhere.” His voice dangerous, advance now pointed.

“What?” Ben feels as though ice water has begun to trickle down his back. 

Something in Anakin’s eyes shimmer, his hand raises and Ben feels something foreign slide its way silkily across his mind. It envelops his consciousness within seconds - seems to cradle him within itself; but rather than being soothing, it sings of violation and malice. Anakin’s scowling face begins to fade from view, moving high above him. It feels like being pushed beneath water but the urge to gasp for breath has been stolen from him. He can feel himself succumbing to the wicked push across his mind; _I’ve never felt anything like this before._

Inexplicably, this thought seems to ignite within him; the struggle that had been stripped from him reforms and he presses upwards, fighting back, forcing his way through the weighing darkness. He senses a flicker of surprise but doesn’t know from where and the sight of their expensive carpet speckles into view. 

“No,” elongated, growled and vehement in a voice he doesn’t recognise. 

He is on the floor, presses himself up and a foot collides with his face; back to the floor. His body uses the force of the blow to roll away, gaining time to right himself again. He feels something warm and wet flood from his nose as he tumbles back to his feet. 

He looks to see Anakin throwing himself bodily across the room at him. His bared shoulder meets Ben’s ribs with a sickening crunch and they both crumple into the wall and to the floor. Anakin is already on top of him reaching straight for his throat as pain blossoms across his torso. A hand from nowhere intercepts Anakin’s reach and pulls him forwards off-balance. Ben realises his body is fighting for him once more, as his knee pistons into Anakin’s gut. A grunt of pain puffs across his face. He is winded. 

“What are you doing?” tries to throw him off and into the wall but legs have wrapped themselves around him and the body above him doesn’t budge. He tries another dig with his knee but Anakin’s hand is grabbing his thigh, pressing it back to the ground before it can make contact. 

“You were supposed to be safe,” Anakin yells, a rage like Ben had never seen bursting through his handsome features, twisting them unrecognisably. “They were supposed to be looking after you!” A hand tangles in his hair, lifts his head and throws it down again into the floor. The grunt catches in his throat as an invisible hand wraps itself over his larynx. 

He struggles against Anakin’s superior weight, hands pressing against his solidity as his lungs begin to burn. He pulls back an arm and before Anakin is able to grab it, slams it into Anakin’s floating ribs. The handless grip on his throat loosens and he repeats the punch, drawing a broken shriek from Anakin. In a single, swift movement, he crunches in on himself; drives his forehead into Anakin’s temple before he knows what he’s doing and suddenly is able to overpower the bulk resting on him. 

He throws Anakin to the side and knows that his only way of winning this fight is the door. He is up and running but something grabs his ankle and he is dragged backwards in an awkward lunge. He feels hands grappling their way up his leg and kicks out. He makes contact with flesh but it doesn’t slow Anakin down. Hands at his waist now, grab him and spin him back into the room. Anakin places himself between Ben and the door. 

“Why are you doing this?” Ben breathes, tasting his own blood where it trickles over his lips. “What’s going on?”

Anakin’s fury turns into a grotesque grin. “They said it would work,” he laughs and it makes Ben want to shrink away but he holds his ground. “They said it would work and I believed them.”

“What are you talking about?” Ben spits, feeling something like terror bubbling within him, as though the entire galaxy is tipping beneath him. 

“You never should have seen that in the street,” Anakin swipes a row of datapads from the table in fury. He glares toward the still rolling holonews. “Kriffing idiots can’t even last a month without karking things up.”

Ben tries but he is unable to put words together. He moves slowly, giving ground to this twisted, lost version of Anakin that advances on him. 

“A month?” he finally manages. His voice rasps, tight from grasping fingers or distress, he doesn’t know. 

“Oh, yes,” Anakin smirks. “That part worked at least - you still feel like you’ve been here for years?”

Ben puts the sofa between them, but Anakin doesn’t allow him to circle around to the door. He seems upset and yet Ben can see there is a part of him that’s enjoying this.

“Yes.” It comes out almost a whisper. 

“It’s been three weeks,” the man he thought he knew sneers. “Three fragging weeks of having you for myself. I told them, some things cannot be buried deep enough.”

“I don’t understand. I can remember-”

“Standing on the Skydome with me during the Battle of Coruscant?” Ben’s breath catches and for a moment he thinks his heart won’t beat again. “Falling out of a tree when you were ten and breaking your leg?” He had never told Anakin that. “Or telling Lumi about how you were worried that I was unhappy, one night in the bar after work? And she said ‘he could never be unhappy with you’.”

“How- can you know that?”

“How about meeting on the roof of the Imperial Palace to watch Coruscanti Prime sink beneath the horizon,” his voice scornful now, “and how I kissed you, just as the last rays of light disappeared behind the skyblocks?” Ben forces himself to breathe. “It’s not real. None of it is real; we put all of those memories into your head.”

“How can that be true? Why? Why would you do that?” Anakin’s words have stopped Ben in his tracks. They no longer circle like caged nexus around each other but stand apart, eyes locked, Anakin astride some perverse excitement at the reveal and Ben struggling to parse the information being thrown at him. 

“You know it to be true. I could tell there was something swimming around in your head that they missed. Something that was making you doubt this.” He looked around their tiny apartment. “It could have been perfect,” he growled. “We could have been together and you wouldn’t have had to worry about anything again. Because I would look after you. But they missed something. They’ve missed something; left it in your head by mistake.”

“Anakin, stop this,” Ben holds up a hand, finding his voice. 

“I'm going to take you back,” his expression changes to one of resolve now and it sends a bolt of warning through Ben’s mind. “If I take you back they’ll be able to fix you and you won’t remember any of this.” Anakin recommences his advance. “They can do it all again and do it right this time. You’ll be happy, just come with me and trust me.”

“Stop,” Ben commands, moving away. There is nothing to pick up, no heavy ornaments he could use for a weapon; Anakin - or whoever this is - had always been a minimalist, in decoration if not in mess. Regardless, he felt like an object would be little help in opposition to whatever it was that had slithered through his mind and wrapped around his throat moments before. “I’m not going with you.”

“You don’t have a choice.” 

The man he thought he loved launches himself with an unnatural power across the room. The leap has him close the distance between them in a moment but Ben’s reactions drag him to the floor into a roll. It would save him, but as he flips to his feet he is thrown bodily against the wall by that unseen force. His breath is knocked from him and he feels his already pounding headache intensify as the pressure drives every inch of him into the surface. He has only seconds before he feels a body pressed flush against his back, the curves and dips so familiar but now also alien.

“Time to go back,” is whispered in his ear, breath hot on his skin. 

The words make him buck against the pressure but his struggle is fruitless. 

“They’re already on their way. Once your handsome face appeared on those billboards, not even I could have stopped them.” Ben grunts again trying desperately to press the other man’s weight off him but it feels like each inch of him is minutely pinned. 

“You told me that wasn’t true - that I was confused,” he chokes. 

“Idiots.” He feels rather than hears the laugh. “Incapable of following the simplest of orders.” He feels the man’s hands run across his sides, palms hot through his thin cotton. 

“Who are you?” Ben gasps. His skin crawls at the touch, which feels like profanity. The hands roam freely across his body, massaging over his shoulders, fingers pressing at his spine, tripping down his back to wrap around his hips. 

“Is not the real question, who are _you_?” he whispers against the skin of Ben’s neck. The hands skim along his belt, thumbs hook over the top, delving to touch the skin beneath. Ben cannot repress the shiver and a laugh rumbles against his back. “Maybe you like it; maybe it’s better this way.” 

Somehow, he is against the wall but deft fingers have slipped between and slid down to grab him through the heavy-duty material of his trousers. He grits his teeth, inhaling sharply through his nose. 

“Stop,” he breathes, steel in his voice, fury crackling in a maelstrom at his centre as he fights against those invisible bonds. 

“That’s not what you said last night, on your knees” ghosted over his ear. He felt the wet touch of a tongue running over the shell.

“Last night, you were my lover,” Ben pants, the tongue not relenting, changing to lips trailing a path down to mouth at his earlobe. 

“I promise you, I was not,” against his neck. A deceivingly tender kiss pressed there, “but you were happy to believe so.” 

Another kiss, so contrary to the blow that had landed moments ago and broken his nose. He can still taste the blood, struggles to breathe past it. The hand is rubbing now, cradling and kneading him. He is thankful suddenly for the durable fabric, for protecting him from sparks, cuts and now marauding hands. 

He allows himself to groan then, lets his hips buck forward into the hand, a direction they are instantly allowed. He feels the smirk against his neck, the nip of pleased teeth and the puff of a laugh across his tingling, sensitive skin. 

“I knew it,” Anakin growls. His hips shunt forwards, nudging Ben uncomfortably into the wall and worse, into his hand. Ben grits his teeth but forces out a grunt that he hopes sounds like pleasure. He is nuzzled into, hips pressing in against him and just at that moment, from somewhere within him he sniffs the drop of guard. 

His elbow jab catches the same ribs as before and he feels the pressure holding him crack and slacken. He transforms his stumble backwards into a spinning backhand, connecting with jawbone and tissue. A following kick gives him space to run. 

He is around the corner and out the door before he hears a yell of fury followed by pursuing footsteps. He palms the door closed behind him, buying himself a few precious seconds. 

Barrelling down the corridor he wonders with a jolt, _where am I running to?_


	4. Ignorance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The graphic is based on a wonderful original work by Damian Bonczyk called 'The Hunt'.

[ ](https://gifyu.com/image/cqjm)

**Part 2**

**△ 1. Ignorance ▽**

The Lower Levels of Coruscant are a place to get lost whenever you do not wish to be found. The teaming streets that roil beneath the lofty, shining spires of the Upper Levels offer shadows aplenty to cowl faces and erase identities. 

The peppery musk of spice clouds the air but it barely catches Ben’s bleeding nose as he slips between street vendors and bar patrons. He ducks beneath a holo-awning advertising Malastarian podracing and tucks himself into shadow. He is painfully aware of his clothing; dashing from the building has left him wearing only a thin shirt and with the night growing colder around him, he knows that any level of conspicuity is a risk. Thieving a layer down here, in the depths of the city will not be so easy as it was above ground in an empty building. Here, eyes are watchful and suspicious. The dark scarf, at least, is still around his neck and he unfurls it, rewrapping the material to cover his distinctly copper hair in a loose hood. He lifts an end of it and gingerly wipes the worst of the blood from his face; a bloody nose, while not uncommon, would be more noticeable than he would like. 

His legs have carried him near Moshi’s Bar, where he drinks with Lumi after work and he grimaces, sinking further back into the shadows. He should have stayed away and yet, where else would he go? Whatever survival instinct that had flared inside him and got him out of Anakin’s grasp seemed not to have thought any further than this. He thinks of Lumi, of Bant… he could go to them, but getting them involved in whatever this mess was seemed less than fair. He is a wanted felon after all. There are punishments for harbouring an enemy of the Empire. 

Anakin’s sneering, livid face flares across his vision and his teeth grind together. _Who are you?_ he wonders. He pushes out into the street, moving before he can think any further on it. There is nothing to be gained by desiccating the past three years of their relationship; after all, it did not exist according to popular sources. His jaw tightens further. 

From the way Anakin had moved, how he had leapt across the room without effort, the press of invisible hands against his throat, he can only be one thing. Ben is glad he is moving otherwise he thinks he might sink to the ground and never rise. How could Anakin be a Force user? He had always been so vehement about the Jedi, so full of disparaging hate for their Order and their creed. 

_“It makes sense,”_ he had always said, _“that the Empire is hunting down Force Sensitives. Anyone with that kind of power is a threat to Imperial rule; a sympathiser to heathen ideals.”_

Ben had said little, wondering at Anakin’s readiness to assume that a being with midichlorians would automatically subscribe to the Jedi ideals. It would never be a discussion he would win and Anakin rarely confronted his silence on the matter. Now, he wonders what Anakin might say. Was Anakin himself Jedi? Was his ferocious distaste a screen to hide the truth of his nature? And why?

And that’s not to speak of his own abilities; exhumed from his subconscious by threat of death. Knowing where a blaster bolt was going before it had been fired? Knowing which alley to duck into from streets he had never visited? 

“Looking for a good time?” the Dathomiri blocks his path, hands already shuffling a velvet cloak off her slim shoulders. “You look like you could use some help relaxing,” she leers, stepping closer but not touching him. 

Something about her catches him and he feels a tug, like someone pulling at the end of a thread. Her ice blue eyes cut through him to the quick. He swallows it quickly but she does not fail to notice; smirks.

“You are kind, but I’m afraid I haven’t the time,” he responds, moving to step around her. 

“Pity,” she shrugs. “I bet I know just what you like.” But he is already lost in the crowd. She watches after him for a moment before her expression closes and she raises her wrist. “Travelling on foot down LL5073, blue shirt, black hood.”

Ben’s instincts tell him to put as much distance between himself and the Dathomiri as possible. He wonders at the flare of… recognition? Warning? But dismisses the analytics in favour of listening to his reaction instead. He darts smoothly along the street now, keeping his head low but senses attentive. He feels something pressing him forwards but he is unable to discern if it is towards something, or away from it. 

A hand grabs hold of his wrist; he immediately moves to swing his free arm into an uppercut when -

“Be quiet and keep moving.” Lumi’s hushed voice folds over him like a warm blanket. She tugs him across the street and down a different path, plastered to his side and holding him close. He presses his lips together, keeping track of where they are going rather than allowing everything he wants to say to flood from his lips. 

They turn a corner and find themselves in a walkway at the bottom of a filthy staircase. Three young Nemoidians are scattered across the stairs like bleachers at a Blob race on Umgul. A group of lowlifes are gathered around some skag who is holding court at the foot of the steps. Just like every part of the Lower Levels, the area teems with activity. Lumi pushes him into a doorway and off the thoroughfare. 

“Lumi-” he breathes but she cuts him off.

“Listen to me. You have about three minutes until they’re on you. If they take you now, we will never get you back. I can’t help you again after this. Keep moving, get to Level 2738. You need to find a safe place. Here,” she proffers a holodisc, presses it into his hand. “Use this as soon as you can.”

“Lumi, what’s going on - how do you know what’s happen-”

“-I’m sorry Obi-Wan there’s no time.”

“What did you call me?”

“Get to Level 2738 and please, please look after yourself.” Her hands squeeze his before one lifts to rest at the back of his neck. It is caring and he almost leans into her touch until he feels a stab of electricity. It jags cruelly into his spine and he grunts, crumpling in on himself. 

“I’m sorry.” She presses on his shoulders encouraging him to stay upright while checking the street distractedly. “That will feel rather overwhelming but I know you’ll figure it out.” She lifts him back to lean against the door. He grunts holding his arms across his chest as every nerve in his body seems to scream at him at once. She leans in, presses a kiss to his cheek. “You have two minutes. Move now.” Her voice is steel. 

His body feels like it has been flooded with energy; his blood is singing, his skin prickling with goosebumps and with his eyes closed, he can _see_ his breath moving through him with each constricted gasp. _What in hells was that?_ He can feel Lumi’s hands at his shoulders but more than that he can feel her in the air in front of him. He can feel her urgency; her dread. Struggling to marshal his senses, he hears her urgings. 

The last thing in the galaxy he wants to do is leave her; apparently his only friend, in a doorway on Level 3104 to stumble, directionless, into the bowels of Coruscant alone. But it seems like this is his only option. 

Ben forces himself to breathe, long and deep. The air is foul but it focuses his mind past the sensory overload and he meets Luminara’s familiar eyes. 

“Go. Go now,” she entreats. Her hands push him from their refuge. 

He moves to the stairs, throwing a glance over his shoulder to the corner but finding no pursuer. He does not look back at Lumi. Up the stairs he presses, keeping his arms folded across his chest, cradling his body against whatever she had done to him. None of the Nemoidians take any notice of him. He takes the steps three at a time. His hand shakes as he tucks Lumi’s holodisc carefully into his pocket. A landing and he darts to the side, feeling how exposed his back is to the street as he turns a corner. 

Filthy duracrete blocks rise around him, enclose him and he pushes onwards. He needs to reach the nearest elevator block and make his way into the guts of the planet. If his guess is right, which it usually is, there should be a portal just under two clicks from here. Lumi said they’re two minutes behind him - _Lumi_. Where had she come from? She seemed like she had been waiting for him. Was she in on this? Whatever this was? And why had she drugged him; was this ethereal trip he was now on meant to improve his chances of escaping?

A silent scurrying in the dark of the passageway scratches his mind. The inexplicable tugs and pulls he felt before seem to have intensified a hundred-fold. It catches his attention, pulling his thoughts from the wider picture back to his immediate, desperate situation. A huge armoured rat darts from behind some haphazard shipping crates. It glances to him, considering but almost immediately thinks better of things and scampers into a drain. 

Then the unmistakable sound of armoured footfall. _Looks like they’ve called in the troopers,_ he thinks. Apparently, his apprehension was now a military matter; not good news. They know he is on this Level and the portal is just far enough that his chances of being caught in these labyrinthine alleyways are unfavourably high. He changes his pace to a run, refocusing his body and trying to ignore how the world seems to shimmer around him. These alleys are too deserted, leaving him exposed and an obvious target. He turns a corner and heads back towards the main streetways. He can sense the threat, _somehow_ , tightening in around him like a closing claw, from all directions. 

Ben dashes into the main street. Neons spark overhead illuminating the balconies, bridges and turbolifts, pistoning from street level to upper storeys. But the neighbourhood is seedy and there are plenty of engineered dark spaces along the edges. Holonews rolls above buildings and he is thankful to see sports being shown rather than his own face. All traces of that announcement seem to have disappeared and for an unnerving moment, he wonders if he did imagine it. 

He slips into a jostling group moving through the street, nudging behind a Wookie and keeping his head low. His heart rate rising encourages a new trickle of blood from his nose. He sees a flash of white exiting the alleyway that he has just left. The buzz of comms through helmet mics and he surreptitiously pulls his hood further over his face. They know what he’s wearing but a black hood, he decides, is still harder to spot than his distinctive copper hair. 

The pace of the group is slow as they are rambunctious and loud. They may hide him within their ranks but they also draw attention to themselves and are moving so slowly that Ben will find himself surrounded if he remains with them. He feels a press of urgency and listens, moving to the side and into darkness behind a row of parked speeder bikes, ignoring the Wookie’s mewl as he slips past. 

A company of troopers emerge from a pulsing club straight into the raucous group. Curses and shouts of abuse erupt as the troopers shoulder their way through the party, clearly searching for him. He dives ahead, walking with urgency through the shadows. His heart is pounding as he falls into step just behind two Chagrian males. 

Listening, he tries to determine the direction of the company of troopers behind but he can hear nothing but the blaring music from the surrounding clubs. A turn off heading west opens to his right; the direction of the portal. He sidesteps behind the Chagrians - and comes face to face with Anakin. His eyes are blazing, shoulders squared. Ben had not felt the slightest flicker of warning. 

“You will not escape this,” Anakin commands. An eruption of blood red light unsheathes by his side. The low, unmistakable hum of a lightsaber rattles the air. “Stop running.” 

His brain is not able to process the sight beyond identifying it as a threat. 

“I haven’t even started.” 

The quip comes from nowhere, as does the lunge for the passing turbolift. His hands catch the edge just as it rises beyond reach. A tug and he’s shuffled on top. The ceiling of the shaft is fast approaching as he skids his compact body along the top of the lift and between two supporting struts. He swings onto an open balcony as though he has been practising the manoeuvre his entire life and springs into a sprint. There is no sense of Anakin behind him but his eyes have already proven this likely to be a lie. He does not dare to spare the time to look back; trusting his pursuer to be committed. 

The balcony comes to an abrupt end but his foot is already on the balustrade; he finds himself in mid-air with an electrical line fast coming to meet him. His hands reach and meet the rubber. It sparks dangerously as it takes his weight. He is lucky; many of these lines are broken, the wiring exposed. He could have been bantha fodder had he chosen one street over. Shouts erupt from below at the cascade of sparks over the street. _Oh well_ , he thinks, _they knew where I was anyway._

Hand over hand he advances, his elbow suddenly throbbing where it had connected with armour plating hours before. Two more swings along the unreliable electrical cable carry him to a lambent sign advertising rooms for rent. He drops onto the strut connecting it to a wall and skips nimbly into the neighbouring window. A Lutrillian startles from his bed as Ben crosses his room with a peaceful wave. He is already in the corridor before the creature can speak. A sprint to the end of the dank hallway; another balcony, vaults over and lands in the street below. He leaves the gasp of a startled woman in the dust and heads for the next corner. A heartbeat later comes another yelp of surprise; Anakin is mere seconds behind him. 

His breathing is deep and steady, but his bruised ribs burn with each inhalation. His work boots are heavy as he skids through another corner. Something large wallops the wall behind where his head was a millisecond before. The next street is an entire company of troopers; an army of white. He had not sensed them. He ducks beneath a passing speeder and rolls into a betting shop. 

He is less than a click from the portal. He dodges between the shop patrons, keeping low and reaching the other side in seconds. Pushing out the back door, the shouts of alarm reach his ears. Another block and he will be at the portal. He feels a nudge to the left and chooses what looks like a dead end. A tiny alley, wired off with electro-fencing. He leaps for the wall, ready to scale the cracking duracreet and vault over when he feels those invisible hands wrap around his leg and tear him to the ground. 

The fall winds him, sends another spike of agony through his abused ribs, a choked cry escaping. As Anakin reaches him he is already pushing to his feet but this time a real hand is in his hair, slamming him back to his knees. His head is jerked back and he feels the blood from his broken nose tickle sickeningly down his throat. 

Anakin’s eyes glare down, only they are not his eyes; they are the eyes of something monstrous, irises dashed yellow encircled with the blood red of his saber. The thrum of the beam accompanies the heat of the blade inches from his face. It seems for a moment that Anakin has no intention of taking him back. It seems he will strike him down here, in the gutters of Coruscant.

A blaster bolt rips through Anakin’s arm. He screams, though more with frustration than pain. The grip in Ben’s hair releases. His body tries to buckle to the grimy street, but he wrenches to his feet and he stumbles back. Anakin is already lunging for him again and he pitches to the side, cradling his ribs. The red blade sweeps a tight arc, deflecting two more bolts and Ben uses the time to stagger out of reach. 

Anakin is a whirling maelstrom of red. Blaster bolts ricochet wildly from him back to where they came from. An unearthly growl of rage bellows from the centre. Ben glances through the fence to see the source of the attack. A lone figure in dark armour and helmet. The being holds their ground, stance wide against the kickback of his DC-15A rifle. He ducks a bolt - his aim is not accurate, not to kill but wild and unpredictable, making it more difficult for Anakin’s deflections to turn deadly. He is only distracting him. Ben decides not to waste his effort. 

With difficulty now he scales a drainage pipe to the height of the fence. It fizzes dangerously at his proximity and he jerks back. There is nothing to break his fall on the other side and the fence is at least eight foot. A stray blaster bolt fries the wall beside him and his arms are shaking with the effort of holding himself. He throws himself bodily over the fence, kicking off the pipe with the last of his strength. The ground comes up to meet him quickly but his knees absorb the impact and launch him into a perfect roll. His ribs groan in complaint but he’s crossed the alley. 

The lone attacker is beginning to relinquish his position, feet dancing to the side. He pauses, ceasing his fire and Ben turns to see Anakin inhumanly high in the air, clearing the fence without any apparent effort. His landing is light and before the attacker has any opportunity to resume fire, his hand flicks the air. A huge fuel drum tumbles, airborne, towards Ben’s rescuer. It’s four times the size of the being and will break their body into pieces. Ben’s hand extends before him and gathers strength from the toxic air, presses it forwards with a glowing might that channels through his chest. Whatever it is, it meets the fuel drum in the air and pitches it sideways, careening into the wall. The remnants of tibanna gas ignite and send searing shrapnel scorching through the air. 

The being with the blaster is beside him, grabbing his arm and Ben has no time to disobey as they tear from the alley. Rounding a corner they skid to a stop in front of an unassuming air speeder. The being doesn’t speak, just shoves him towards it before he leaps across the back and into the pilot’s seat. He hesitates; the moment is enough to get them both killed but-

“I'm a friend - get in!” The speeder engine has already started. He does not have a choice. He clambers in, arm wrapped across himself. They are in the air before his leg is even over the side. 

A blare of horns sounds as they ascend directly through an inter-level skylane before banking wildly and heading east. 

“No!” he grunts. “The other way! I need to get to Level 2738.”

“There’s nothing there.” The voice is modulated through the dark helmet, but the accent is distinguishable - not Coruscanti. Perhaps not even from a Core World. “It’s a dead end.”

“What? Am I supposed to just trust you?” Ben stammers ineloquently. 

“I didn’t realise you had other candidates,” the voice quips as they dodge between lanes of oncoming traffic. 

Ben grits his teeth, sliding lower in the seat in an attempt to keep his torso straighter. He has now lost track of where they are headed and something in the back of his mind sings at his lack of regard but he is unable to muster any real concern. His mind feels fogged now and his body is beginning to falter. His chest is tight and he cannot tell whether it is from panic or the pain in his ribs. His eyes drift to the pilot beside him; armour mismatched and scuffed but cared for and functioning. A slow inhale and shaking exhale through his mouth as he struggles to regulate his breathing. 

The speeder pitches to the side and tumbles downwards, hurtling towards the ground at full throttle. A small opening between two walkways widens before them. They shoot through the gap with practised certainty into the byways and backlanes of the city, reaching a lower portal in moments. It descends ceaselessly into the bowels of the planet. They hover above the infinitely descending void for a second- then the pilot stalls the speeder. 

They fall into a dead drop… 

Ben grasps the side of the speeder as the recycled air belts past his face, dragging its smoggy fingers through his hair as they fall. The pilot punches the controls and the speeder gutters. He jabs again, twice now but the engine splutters and fails to ignite. His curse is lost to the levels above as they continue to plummet. He pulls at a clutch, siphons the fuel between engine ports but the speeder groans in refusal. 

Ben can barely see past the tears being torn from his eyes but he knows the speeder is an XJ-2. He reaches over awkwardly and flicks off the ignition for the anti-grav generators before dragging the clutch into gear and reigniting them. The speeder coughs to life, in gear and jerks forwards. The pilot banks them around just in time to avoid the side of the portal and without hesitation drags them back up the ten levels they lost. They flit into a gap that is almost devoid of traffic. 

The pilot only takes them a few clicks from the portal before landing them in a deserted street. Broken holoscreens flicker above their heads. He leaps out and moves around to help Ben, supporting his weight as he slides to the ground. 

“Come on,” commands the modulated voice. He turns expectantly, hand still under Ben’s arm but meets resistance. Ben leaves his weight resting against the smoke-blackened bodywork of the speeder, unable to hide his slump. 

“Who are you?” he breathes. 

“There’s no time.”

“You sound like a clone,” Ben shoots. “You could be leading me straight to them.”

Something of his words seem to injure the being; the man. He releases his hold on Ben and steps back as though bitten. There is a moment of suspension before the man inhales and removes his helmet. 

The face of a thousand men stares back at Ben, but weathered, scarred; unique. 

The clone seems to search his face for something and does not find it. His jaw tightens and he jerks his head to the side. “I’m taking you to the Alliance.”

“The Rebels aren’t any more my friends than the Empire,” Ben presses, voice thin. 

“The Rebels aren’t hunting you down like a dog,” the clone retorts. 

There is a rumbling from the direction of the portal behind them; they are almost certainly still closely pursued. A spark twists from the rickety power cables above. Ben eyes him, tasting the blood from his nose on his tongue, struggling to force his brain into action. He cannot see a way out; another direction but how can he bring himself to trust a faceless stranger with a weathered blaster rifle and stolen armour? 

The clone sees his hesitation. 

“Obi-Wan,” the name sends a wave of unease over his body. Exactly what Lumi had called him not half an hour before; a name he had never heard in his forty-something years. Until tonight.

He swallows thickly. “How do you know that name?”


	5. Yet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Obi-Wan, I can’t imagine how this feels-”
> 
> “Don’t call me that - who is Obi-Wan?” he snaps. 
> 
> “Someone lost,” the clone remarks, moving away. His expression is tight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone  
> Welcome back to this magical mystery tour of a fic  
> I am SO SORRY it's taken me so long to come back with this chapter. I've had it written since before I posted Chapter 1 but unfortunately just haven't had time to post it because of RL things. My dad was very ill and then a house move and life happened.  
> But the important thing is, we're all here now.  
> Thanks so much for sticking with me if you're here! I hope this turns out to be worth the wait.  
> WARNING: for potential minor surgery, graphic detail

**▲ 2. Yet ▽**

“Because it’s your name.”

Ben watches something like hurt roll through the clone before him. The man’s gaze drops to the dirt as the rumbling of Imperial ships approach behind. A beat before warm eyes flick back to him. 

“Trust me.”

He feels the breath of wind against his neck as their pursuers draw nearer through the portal and it’s enough. 

Ben pushes off the speeder and forces his legs back into motion. Once he is clear of the speeder the clone moves back and leans over, flicking the engine to life and flooring the accelerator. He pulls back his arm as the speeder zooms off, only to crash mercilessly into the wall in front. Smoke begins to curl from the unrecognisable wreckage but Ben’s arm is back in the clone’s grasp and they are running to cover. 

After a painful jog through more twisting alleyways the clone pulls him to a doorway. Now every breath feels laboured. Ben rests a hand against the doorframe, curling in half. 

“We’ll be safe here,” the clone murmurs, swiping his palm across the access scanner.

Ben’s head pulses painfully, once. Twice. It overwhelms him. He turns and vomits into the gutter. His empty stomach does not have much to give and tears rise to his eyes as his ribs contract with each retch. He slams an embittered hand painfully into the door frame. 

A warm palm presses to his back. He can feel the heat from the clone’s skin radiate through his thin, grime-covered shirt. It is strangely intimate; comforting. He spits a mouthful of bloody bile into the darkness. The hood is useless now. He tears it from his head and wipes his mouth with it before tossing it into the gutter as well. A small stagger that he would prefer not to admit is caught again by those warm hands. They support him through the open doorway. 

It is a tiny house, scummy and derelict. They lurch into a dim main room with no windows and a woman standing in the corner by a table. She turns. Had Ben not already divested his stomach of its contents, he would have done so now. 

“You,” he breathes as the clone hefts him to a hard chair. 

“You know her?” the man’s voice is sharp and demanding. He moves to stand in front of him. “How? Where do you remember her from?” Immediately Ben thinks he has made a mistake. This feels like an interrogation and he is injured and vulnerable. 

“Obi-Wan, I can’t imagine how this feels-”

“Don’t call me that - who is Obi-Wan?” he snaps. 

“Someone lost,” the clone remarks, moving away. His expression is tight. “He’s got some broken ribs, they’re wearing him down. He won’t make it much further.”

“It seems this is a discussion I should be part of,” Ben grouses. “And who are you?” he throws to the woman. The woman from his dreams. Nightmares. 

She gently steps around the clone. Her endless brunette tresses are pulled elegantly back from her face; the one he has seen so many nights, twisted in agony. Her clothes are disparate, muddied and worn with a military-issue gillet on top. “You know me already.”

He swallows. “Yes,” he answers, little more than a whisper. “But I don’t know how.”

The clone walks to the table in the corner. A bag that Ben had not noticed a moment before is open there. He thinks he can see the butt of a gun peeking out of the top as the man begins to rummage. 

“We’ve known each other for many years. My name is Padmé,” her voice is strong; matter-of-fact, as she lowers herself to a crouch before him. “You have spent the last four years working as a high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance -”

“-that’s not possible,” Ben shakes his head, a laugh escaping him. It sounds so ridiculous. But somehow, looking at her face; her familiar face which he has never seen before he can taste the truth of her words. Her eyes gleam with it. The air in this stale room is thick with it. 

The clone crosses the space with a small scanner in his hands. He levels it at Ben who twitches away. 

“It must be very difficult to hear,” she places a hand on his knee. He finds he doesn’t want to remove it. “We believe that the Empire seized you just over nine months ago and have altered your memory.”

It is the second time tonight he has heard this story. Apparently the first time, he had heard it from the Empire itself. Now he is hearing it from the Rebellion?

“They’ve implanted a manufactured set of memories in your head and - we hope - suppressed your own memories.”

Without explanation the clone takes another step nearer and flicks a beam of blue light across his chest. He begins to methodically scan the length of Ben while the woman speaks. 

“We’ve been looking for you for so long,” her voice softens. Her eyes crinkle as she smiles but it is bittersweet. “I’m sorry we weren’t faster. The commotion in the street today was investigated by our intel units and it wasn’t long before we found the deleted holoboards.”

“They were real then?” Ben asks, straightening, ignoring the heat flaring from his side. 

“Yes,” she answers, regarding him closely. “They were an accident; a slip-up by the Imperial Police. Your face never should have been broadcast like that. Some poor blue-collar worker will suffer for that mistake, but we have them to thank for finding you.”

“Why was it so important to find me?” he questions, looking from the clone to… Padmé. 

Her lips press together. “There are not many Jedi left in the galaxy. The ones that are still with us are precious.”

He does not have time to react to knowledge that he is apparently a traitorous Jedi before the clone cuts in. 

“You’re also a General,” the man’s eyes don’t rise from the scanner. “You know the locations of our bases, the names of our allies, our plans. You are too dangerous to be left with them.” His voice is studiously emotionless and detached. 

“And you’re a friend.” Padmé presses on his knee. “Where have you been?” 

The scanner bursts into a flurry of warning bleeps. An E-11 is aimed at his head. Ben freezes, jaw tightening as he meets the clone’s gaze down the barrel. Padmé steps away, hand moving to her own blaster at her hip.

“He has a tracker,” the man intones, staring unblinkingly into Ben’s eyes. 

“What?” Ben asks.

“He won’t have known,” Padmé placates, raising her free hand in defusal.

“We don’t know that.” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ben grits, staring unflinchingly back at the clone. The man seems to have a deeply ingrained mistrust of him. 

“Where?” Padmé bites. 

“Back of his neck.”

“We can’t remove it here,” she looks to the man. 

“We have the gear.”

“But not the surgeon,” Padmé presses, turning fully to face him now. 

“We can’t take him a step further with that thing in him,” the man insists. He is watching Ben like he’s a timebomb. 

“I don’t remember getting your name,” Ben asserts slowly, an eyebrow quirking upwards. Something about it makes the clone falter and all of the man’s certainty seems stripped away in an instant. The pause in the room is heavy. 

“Can you do it?” Padmé questions. 

“I’ve seen it done. But not on a Force Sensitive,” the man’s voice regains some of his previous composure. “If it’s linked to his signature, I could cause irreversible damage.”

“Then we have no choice,” Padmé dismisses. 

“We can’t take him to Bail while he’s being tracked,” the man insists. 

Ben’s patience times out. He forces his weary body to its feet. 

“Stay where you are!” the clone reshuffles himself, stepping closer; threatening. The blaster’s safety is already off. He is ready to shoot. Ben considers that it may not be a stun shot. 

“Lower your blaster or I’ll leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere, General.”

“I’ve had quite enough of people telling me what I can and cannot do this evening. You haven’t lifted me out of a firefight just to shoot me now.” He lifts his eyebrows knowingly. “I must be valuable to you.”

“In more ways than you know, Obi-Wan... Ben,” Padmé corrects herself; an appeasement. Her gaze flicks to the man before sliding back to him. 

“You’re safer to us dead than in their hands,” the man cites coldly. 

“Why is that?” Ben frowns, swaying minutely.

“We have reason to believe that you have information pertaining to Imperial movements and strongholds-”

“-careful,” the man interrupts Padmé’s confession. 

“If that’s the case, then we both want the same thing,” Ben negotiates, the words rising to him from the exhausted mist of his mind. “It is in both our interests for me to stay alive.”

“You’re a liability.”

“A necessary one.”

“Debatable.”

“How about we explore the possibility?” Ben nods to the E-11. “I’m unarmed. It seems like the most dangerous thing I can do is run. You have my word that I won’t.”

“I doubt you would get very far if you did,” but he lowers the blaster. 

“We have to try,” Padmé decides. “We can look; see if removing it here is a possibility.”

“You think there’s a tracking device in my neck?” Ben summarises allowing himself to lean on the chair.

“Almost certainly,” the man responds. 

He remembers the jolt of pain as Lumi pressed her hand to his nape a few hours before. The overwhelming wave of sensation and awareness; of life that flooded his body. 

“I think you might be right. I met a friend.”

“A... who?” Padmé queries. 

“A friend; someone I work with,” Ben shakes his head, still unsure of the full story. “She seemed to know what was going on.” He suddenly remembers the holodisc. “She gave me this.” He reaches for his pocket, offering a surrendering hand to the clone, who twitches the blaster at his movement. He holds it up before them. “And she… she touched my neck and…”

Neither of them interrupt or prompt. It seems for the first time he has them at a loss.

“Something happened, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s connected.”

“What happened?” Padmé presses, taking a step closer. 

“I felt… something. Well, I felt everything.” He looks to the floor as though the answers might be scored there in the dust. 

“An inhibitor.” The clone’s voice is dark. “I thought… How did you catch that fuel cell in the alley?”

Ben remembers reaching with his mind, stretching out his hand and hurling the tank into the wall. “I… I don’t know. Things have been happening to me; it’s like my body is doing things by itself.”

“Whoever this ‘friend’ is seems to have disabled the inhibitor,” the still unnamed man says, turning to Padmé. “If that’s the case it would make removing it less dangerous. If it’s no longer connected to his Force signature then there is less risk of his body going into shock.”

“Is it a tracker or an inhibitor?” he butts in, allowing himself to slump back to the chair. 

Padmé moves to the bag in the corner as she answers: “Both. You can’t place a hidden tracker in a Force user without an inhibitor; otherwise the presence of the tracker is too easily detected. You would have sensed it within seconds of waking up.” She crosses back to him with a small hypo in her hand. “This will help with the pain.” She does not await an answer before jabbing it into his neck.

He grits his teeth against the scratching sensation beneath his skin. He wonders if she is referring to his ribs or what seems to be imminent for his neck. 

“It still won’t give us long,” the man reasons aloud. “If he doesn’t understand how to consciously use the Force he’ll be broadcasting himself across the galaxy as we speak. Either way, we can’t win this.” Ben notices the man’s continued propensity for not speaking to him. “If we reactivate the inhibitor then we have the tracker to worry about - if we don’t, the Emperor will be able to smell him from lightyears away.”

Padmé searches the man’s face. “Shielding. Do you think you can talk him through it?”

The clone’s face slackens into an expression of bewilderment. “I-... It’s not-... he.” He twitches; tries again. “I’m not…”

“I know,” Padmé murmurs. She places a hand on his armoured shoulder. The weight of the conversation does not pass Ben by. “But he talked to you. He taught you-”

“-he explained things but… that doesn’t mean I ever really understood them,” the man spews. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Describe it. He’s still in there. His body knows - and the Force knows him,” she urges. 

The clone seems more daunted by the prospect of talking to Ben than by anything else discussed this evening. He seems to struggle to gather himself, eyes scanning the dusty floor as Ben’s had moments before. 

“Fine. Let’s take one thing at a time,” he nods, then looks to Ben. It is the first eye contact they’ve made since arriving in the room that has not been a threat. “Sit backwards on the chair. We’ll get some bacta for those ribs in the meantime.” He heads over to the bag, setting his blaster beside it.

“You said you haven’t done this before,” Ben hazards but moving gingerly nevertheless to follow the man’s direction. 

“I’m no medic but we don’t have a choice.”

Padmé gestures for him to tug off his shirt, helping him pull the ragged cotton over his head. He can tell from her grim expression that his ribs are already blossoming purple and decides not to look. She disappears and returns seconds later with a large bacta patch and roll of dressing. Ben hears the sound of metallic instruments being unfurled from the bag as she patches the bacta onto his side and begins to wrap the dressing around his body. 

His skin stands in goose pimples, though his shirt had done little to keep him warm. The sensation seems to arise more from exposure to the company rather than the air. The sound of another chair being dragged over the grimy floor. 

Padmé finishes and takes both his hands in hers. He cannot help but feel innate trust in her burgeoning through him. She is young but holds herself with a strength not often found in one so short of years. He can feel her in the air; her warmth, her determination, her deep compassion. He can feel her yearning for-

“Right, tilt your head forward and try to keep as still as possible,” the man’s voice approaches behind him. 

He represses a shiver and complies, lowering his forehead to the back of the chair. A bright light flicks on behind him, throwing his shadow across Padmé’s legs. 

“What’s your name?” Ben asks, voice tight. A pause and he loses hope of an answer. Then:

“Cody…” 

A beat. Then:

“Hold his head.”


End file.
